In terms of a return on your money you can get as much as 8.1% of course this depends on who you lend to and for how long. It’s also worth mentioning some ‘small print’ as below.

• To reduce your financial risk, your lending of £500 or more is split into chunks across at least 50 different borrowers.
• Borrowers enter into legally binding contracts with their lenders.
• All of the Zopa borrowers’ repayments are by monthly direct debit. If any of the payments are missed then a collections agency uses the same recovery process that the high street banks use.
• And you may ask what does Zopa get out of it? Well, Zopa earns money from the borrower by charging a £118.50 transaction fee and all lenders a 1% annual servicing fee.

So first things first you need to open and account, go to Zopa and follow the easy step by step process through and you will then have a Zopa account.

You firstly need to transfer money into your Zopa account and this can be done by debit card, standing order or bank transfer, clearly you need to have money to be able to lend!

Then Zopa has two processes to help you create your offer to lend.

Quick Lend – this is a really simple process, in this you choose how much you want to lend for how long and what return you would like, give your offer a name and that’s it.

Customer Lend – this is where you choose the amount to lend, also give the offer a name and then choose which markets you are prepared to lend into and the maximum amount you are prepared to lend to each individual borrower, a great way to spread your risk. Also custom lend will show you where money is currently moving the fastest so this should mean your offer gets picked up quicker!

When you login in you can see if your offers have been taken up through a great lending offers dashboard, and this shows a summary of your lending offers as well as the earnings you are making.

So there you go how to create an account and lend money on Zopa, if you want to try it yourself sign up here.

There is a site called Zopa a true social site that allows you to lend and borrow money without the need for a bank.

Basically social lending is where people lend and borrow money with each other, with no need for a bank. It really is that simple and it means if you have some some spare cash, it could just be as little as £100 or maybe could do with borrowing a bit, either way it could be well worth checking out. With over 300,000 members and over £50 million of lending through the site surpassed in August 09 you can be assured of the confidence in the site.

So why not see for yourself and pay Zopa a visit.

I shall be posting more on Zopa, how to open an account, borrow and lend money in the future so why not subscribe to my RSS feed to be kept updated.